Digital Archive....

Five reasons why Kenya and Africa should take off Africa Can... - End Poverty A week hardly goes-by without one or more international investors announcingmajor investment interests in Nairobi, or other African capital cities. Nokia, Nestle, and IBM are some of the companies which intend to position themselves more strongly in (East) Africa. True, their investments may still be low by international standards, but they are increasingly becoming noticeable.  On a macroeconomic level, the new Africa momentum has also been evident. Africa has weathered both the global financial crisis, and the turbulence in the Euro zone . According to World Bank's latest economic outlook, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow above 5 percent in 2012 and 2013 . This would be higher than the average of developing countries (excluding China), and substantially, above growth in high-income countries. This means that at some point in this decade, Africa could grow above...

Malawi wisdom Africa Works After the sudden death, by heart attack, of Malawi's 78-year president, Bingu wa Mutharika, earlier this month, Malawians anxiously suffered several days of uncertainty. First, the government would not immediately proclaim the president dead. Having been flown to South Africa for medical attention, Mutharika seemed to have gone missing rather than ceasing to exist. The confusion, of course, was ultimately explained by the rules of succession in Malawi, which called for vice president, Joyce Banda, to assume executive power. Not only was Banda a women in a Malawi riddled with casual sexism and long traditions patriarchal behavior, she was also a critic of Mutharika, a former World Bank official who seemingly did the impossible in managing an economic revival but tarnished his reputation by displaying increasingly autocratic behavior. Mutharika's death, then, had the potential to plunge Malawi, a small and oddly-shaped co...

JP Morgan Debacle Reveals Fatal Flaw In Federal Reserve Thinking The Baseline Scenario By Simon Johnson Experienced Wall Street executives and traders concede, in private, that Bank of America is not well run and that Citigroup has long been a recipe for disaster.  But they always insist that attempts to re-regulate Wall Street are misguided because risk-management has become more sophisticated – everyone, in this view, has become more like Jamie Dimon, head of JP Morgan Chase, with his legendary attention to detail and concern about quantifying the downside. In the light of JP Morgan's stunning losses on derivatives, announced yesterday but with the full scope of total potential losses still not yet clear (and not yet determined), Jamie Dimon and his company do not look like any kind of appealing role model.  But the real losers in this turn of events are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the New York Fed, whose approach to ...

Imperfect, OverReaching, Bonus-Driven Bankers The Big Picture The disclosure by once future Treasury Secretary and current JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon of a sudden and previously undisclosed $2 billion dollar derivative loss should be a wake up call. It unwittingly reveals much about the present state of finance: • The inherent tension between traders using leveraged risk with Other People's Money in the pursuit of enormous bonuses is still weighed heavily towards excess risk taking; • There is no bank in the United States that has demonstrated the ability to manage proprietary trading risks — if they use derivatives and/or leverage; • It took less than 3 years after the financial crisis peaked for traders to engage in the same sorts of highly leveraged reckless speculative bets that helped crash the economy last time. Imagine the sorts of risks these mis-incentivized desks will be doing when the memories of the crisis fade 10 years after. • Tr...

Soaring Meat Consumption in China Has Global Implications All Roads Lead to China After writing the piece China's Energy Gaps Create Opportunities last week, a few different articles came across my RSS reader that highlighted the need for a food post as well. Food is one of those things that I do not think gets enough attention. There are certainly more than enough stories about food safety in China, largely byproducts of lacking investment on the farm and in the distribution chain, but it is China's reliance on imports that will become the story going forward.  As the above articles suggest. According to the Earth First article Meat Consumption in China Now Double That in the United States : More than a quarter of all the meat produced worldwide is now eaten in China, and the country's 1.35 billion people are hungry for more. In 1978, China's meat consumption of 8 million tons was one third the U.S. consumption of 24 million to...

Maid in Ethiopia Baobab IN LATE February 2012, Alem Dechasa, an Ethiopian maid working in Lebanon, was video-taped being beaten and dragged into a car. On March 14th, she committed suicide. Her story has drawn attention once again to the plight of migrant workers in the Middle East. But Ms Alem's fate has also highlighted a more unpleasant side of Ethiopia's impressive growth story. Ethiopia's economy is based on small-scale agriculture. More than 85% of the country's 80m people live in the countryside. Most have limited or no access to such basics as clean drinking water, health-care facilities and education. Helen Gebresillassie, a lawyer who teaches at Stony Brook University's School of Social Welfare in New York and a former legal advisor to the Forum on Street Children in Ethiopia, an NGO, says that high inflation and market inefficiencies keep most farming household incomes so low that everyone must work, including children. When ...

Dispensers for Safe Water in Haiti Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Lilian Lehmann and Alexandra Fielden "Has anyone in your family had cholera in the last 6 months?" the surveyor asks. "Yes. Five. Wait, no, six" the head of the household responds. Another family member sitting on the front step of their straw-thatched hut chimes in, "No, no, it's seven." While cholera in Haiti ha s received renewed media coverage in the past few days, following the launch of a new vaccination program , the situation itself is no longer really novel. For over a year and a half, humanitarian and development agencies have been struggling to respond to the devastating cholera outbreak that has so far claimed around 7,040 lives, and sickened more than 530,000. Chlorine is the simplest, most effective water treatment option for killing the cholera bacteria and as such, the Ha...

Beyond Kony 2012 Texas in Africa Longtime readers of this blog may note that I have showed uncharacteristic restraint in responding to Kony 2012 by, well, actually not posting on it at all. One reason for this is that the third year of the tenure track oh my word it is hectic and I have several actual scholarly articles coming out to prove it. Another, better reason though is that thanks to the forward-thinking optimism of Wronging Rights ' Amanda Taub, I wrote a chapter for a new ebook . Beyond Kony 2012 , edited by Taub, is an attempt to educate journalists, educators, and anyone else wanting to learn more about the LRA crisis and how to effectively respond. There are several contributors from all over the world including many TIA favorites like TMS Ruge, Rebecca Hamilton, Adam Branch, Alanna Shaikh, and Daniel Kalinaki. All the contributors wrote with a critical eye (hint: none of us are big fans of the Invisible Children approach), but also with ...

My Daughter Will Be CEO of the World's Most Valuable Company Someday The Baseline Scenario By James Kwak At least, that's the impression I get from reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which I finally finished this weekend. It's not a particularly compelling read; it basically marches through the stages of his professional life, which is already the subject of legend, so there isn't much suspense. I fear that it will inspire a new generation of corporate executives to imitate all of Jobs's personal shortcomings—but without his genius. The picture you get from the book is basically that Steve Jobs acted like a five-year-old for his whole life. He could be wrong about some basic, uncontroversial fact yet insist stubbornly that he was right. He divided the world into things that were great and things that were terrible, and his classifications could be arbitrary. He was an obnoxiously picky eater, constantly complaini...

Long Term Secular Cycles on S&P The Big Picture Since we discussed the psychology of longer term cycles this morning , let's step back see how they look over the long haul, via The Chart Store . When you look at the individual bear markets (charts 2-5) think about what some of these long slogs do to investor sentiment and psychology: > ˜˜˜ ˜˜˜ More charts/cycles after the jump: ˜˜˜ ˜˜˜ All charts courtesy of The Chart Store . Sent with Reeder  (verzonden vanaf tablet)